Denis Johnson - Already Dead - A California Gothic

“When that dog took my throat in his teeth, it was the best thing that ever happened to me. Because it drove me to the arms of my one true friend, our Lord Jesus Christ who laid down his life for me. That’s what it took, because I was lost, man — I! Was! Lost !” Now the preacher looked worried, might have forgotten what he wanted to say, or thought no one liked him. His face took on a sheen, it glowed like the sun, and his tongue sounded thick in his mouth and he began drawling like an Okie. “We are deaf, dumb, blind, retarded, and crazy!” People in the congregation laughed and shouted Yes, Yes, Yes, or wept in silence, or shut their eyes and raised their right hands as if to touch some hovering thing delicately with their fingers. “We think up is down, black is white, true is false. No wonder we die! — something’s abound to kill somebody like that sooner or later!

“Even when we mean to tell the truth there’s only poison coming out of our faces. It’s happening right now unless praise God I’m suffused, and I hope I am, with the Holy Spirit. Nothing on my own power.

Nothing on my own power.” Suddenly his face popped as if 318 / Denis Johnson

with shock and he shouted, “Praise God!” and then stood looking down at his feet and breathing. He looked up:

“You think action will save us? You really think there’s anything we can do?

“Philosophy? — are we going to think our way out of this one? We’ve gotten ourselves in such a jam that this time God alone can help us.

“That’s the position this world is rigged to put us in in the first place!

This race is fixed so we come out losers. Destitute. Flat broke.”

“Amen! A -men!” voices cried.

A great sadness bore down on him and bowed his neck and he swayed like a mourner. “Yes, I too am a fool, I turn to Jesus with these broken birds in my hands…”

“Amen! Yes God!”

“God’s love, God’s love…” Mike squinted, eyes closed, as if trying hard to hear something somewhere. “The Old Testament shows Him as almost a dragon, and we’re dandelions gone to seed, and the best way He can love us is by not even breathing on us. By leaving us be.

And that’s love the hard way…”

“Praise God! Praise him!”—Carrie herself was shouting.

“He lets us— lets us — he lets us take on burdens we can’t carry but maybe two-three steps and then boom! And we’re just groaning under the weight of it. Groooaaning — Romans now,” he said brightly, “Romans eight twenty-six and twenty-seven: ‘Praying with groans that God understands.’ You got it there? Groooaaaning. Groaning under the weight of sin. God leaves us grooooaaaning…” He stooped down low as if bent beneath some massive burden…as if completely crushed…

A small answering thunder emanated from somewhere in the pews, and two women stood up with concern on their faces and stumbled over one another, moving into the aisle as a big man slumped sideways on the bench. He moaned until the air was crushed from his lungs in a muttering gasp. The two women, sharp, well-turned-out ladies perhaps originally from L.A., fell both to their knees at the pew’s end beside this collapsed logger, and one took his face in her hands.

Little Clare tried to stand up in his seat, grabbing at the back of it and squirming like a monkey. Carrie pushed him down by his shoulders and felt herself rising, standing, straightening up to ease a sudden burning in her solar plexus.

Already Dead / 319

“God understands! God understands!” Mike shouted. “God knows!” He doubled over, clutched at his belly, and let out a moan that ascended as he lifted himself up straight and then halfway over backward, until he wailed like an infant.

Then everyone began to groan. She’d never done this before but she was doing it now, letting it all go. If there was such a thing as the Holy Spirit, this had to be it, or the sound of it, or the Spirit tearing the voice of Satan from her heart, the music of his lies and nightmares flying out of her, and she didn’t care where they went.

An hour passed in the time-chasm. The door, better than halfway ajar, feinted and stuttered on its hinges. Frank became aware too of physical changes, a silence, a cloud that disturbed the daylight. He understood at last; and would have laughed but his neck ached, his jaws were exhausted, he couldn’t laugh: Failure to Appear.

“Guilty,” Frank said.

He rubbed at his face and stood up, moved quickly in an onslaught of disequilibrium to the door frame and its right angles. Its verticals and sensibles. He put his teeth back in his mouth. Stood massaging his groin through his pants. Nobody out there.

His body was all jags and angles. He took its cluttered assortment back to the couch and sat down and a long breath filled him almost to bursting before it racked out in a sigh. Bag of reefer right there on the floor, a red leather purse open on the couch beside him. Clouds took the daylight farther off.

The walls about him creaking and shrugging, he sat amid an arrangement of dark spaces on which he made out scattered hieroglyphics. I am in the deepest time-chasm ever, he thought. Thirst raked up and down his esophagus, or was it another craving? Maybe a cigarette — he couldn’t remember whether he smoked or not.

The dog broke through it all, a dog of action, moving to the forefront and standing there in bleak nobility and communicating its desire for a can of soup.

Truman!

Frank rose up and made his way toward the kitchen, the world of soup, but heard the humming catch its breath around him, and he burst out of the place into the night.

New universe. Oxygen and fog. He’d exited that tomb and 320 / Denis Johnson

regained the animal world. Things without thought but twitching.

Heads closed around stuff like walnut meat that never bothered them.

“Your rights . Don’t worry, I’ll read them ten times to you in the car, okay? Let’s go, the man here is hungry for his supper.”

— This wasn’t being said now, but hung out in the karmic aether to be bumped into much like the sappy mist. He didn’t know where he was but he could hear the wheels of old carts laboring along the coast and the cries of scuttled fishers trying to find one another in the closing moments.

Yvonne was about to call him. She inhaled the last of the day, leaving the dark of eventide. She breathed out the word of his name. He heard it long before it reached him.

On this side of the road the presence of a cherry-colored metal-flake Harley both moved and consoled Clarence Meadows as he entered the Full Sails.

He nodded to the leather-garbed bikey and his wife, who sat at a table with beers before them, also shiny black helmets.

“That your beautiful machine out front?”

“Yes it is,” the man said.

“Best thing I’ve seen all day.”

“Thank you.”

Meadows wanted to correct himself when he saw the waitress, for she was another gift of the afternoon, almost as stunning as a Harley in the sun. Lovely in a way that made him feel like ordering something.

He sat at the counter and said to her, “Wherefore.”

“What?” she said.

“It’s Shakespeare. It’s all I know of Romeo and Juliet .” She didn’t laugh. She stared at him until her evident concern prompted him: “Oh yeah,” he confessed, “it’s a deep down day.”

“Are you feeling bad?”

“The worst in a long time.”

“You need a friend.”

“I lost a friend.”

“You need another.”

“Maybe we could”—he shrugged, sighed—“Go camping or something sometime.”

The woman looked regretful. “I don’t think I could.” Already Dead / 321